BRICK BEGINS

This is just a start, but I can tell already that it's going to be a long, slow process, so I won't wait for completion. We fell in love with a brick when we were living in Asheville, and after literally years of asking around, finally found the company that makes it, almost by accident.  Unfortunately, we also found out that they're in Nebraska, and shipping brick is not cheap.  It's a lustrous dark gray, with a little bit of brown and even purple and blue, depending on the light.  It's a little bit shiny, as if it were glazed, but it's certainly not.  It's just a special clay from that region that takes on a slight sheen when it's fired.  In the end, we couldn't find anything locally that came close, so we ordered two truckloads of Endicott brick and it arrived right around Christmas.  This is absolutely the most beautiful brick I've ever seen, so Endicott - if you're listening - send me a kickback.

We began with the vertical brick, on the exterior foundation walls.  We used three different sizes: utility, norman and modular, and a number of different shapes within each size.  Most of the exterior work was done in utility size brick, which is 4x4x12 nominal.

This is the stair down to the spillway terrace, outside the library.  The landing negotiates the changing angle of the retaining wall on the left.

 

Jerry Bradshaw, our master mason, laying out the radiant heating lines in our exterior bench - more about this later...

A finished wall.  It's hard to appreciate the iridescent sheen of the Endicott brick in a photo, especially when it still has mortar residue all over, but this brick is incredible.  I'm jealous of any architect who lives in Nebraska - I would be using this product on every job I drew.

Another bench wall.

And another view of our first really finished brick wall.

Maybe here you can see a little of the reflective sheen of the brick.  Okay, maybe I'm a detail geek, but I love this brick.

LONG LOST LUMBER MILL FOOTAGE

I really thought we had lost these images, but they turned up this morning in the far reaches of my hard drive, so now's the time to post.  The Grandin Lumber Company was built around 1900, about 8 miles east of us in then-thriving Grandin, North Carolina.  It was damaged by flooding in the '30's and used as a barn until Hurricane Hugo knocked it to the ground in 1989.  When Edgar Howell took me to see it in 2009, it looked like a bonfire pile of slowly decaying lumber.  I bought all the yellow pine and oak timbers for $5000, hoping it would be enough for the house, which we still hadn't completely designed.  My friend Tony Moretz painstakingly denailed the timbers and cut them into slabs with a portable bandsaw mill, set up on-site.  

Still a lot of good lumber in that pile...

Our pile of usable timbers.  You can see some of the massive bolts still embedded in the timbers.

That's the grain that I was looking for - tight, even growth without too many knots.  This was a smaller timber and probably yielded very little finished lumber.  Maybe 3 or 4  5-inch wide decking boards.

Luckily, many of the other timbers were much larger, and we wound up with a nice stack of slabs like this:  1 3/4" thick by a full 12" wide.  It will finish out about 1 1/2" x 11.  But the grain and the color of that piece are incredible.

Drywall

The heading is lower case, because I know it's not that exciting.  But what is exciting is the feeling that we're moving on to the finishing stages!  Still, that will probably drag on for another three or four months.

The first coat of mud!  It took us almost a week to finish the first coat, but second and third will go much faster.  We're using a bullnose corner bead, shown loose on the left and installed on that corner.  It just softens the corner a bit and makes drywall look more like plaster

Downstairs, with drywall.  The green, for the uninitiated, is moisture-resistant drywall.  It's going behind our kitchen counters and laundry / utility area.

Rodney, finishing up the first coat

Johnny, starting the second coat

This is the peak where everything comes together.  The ridges and valleys will be covered by wood trim once the sheetrock is finished and painted.

Clearly not drywall, but it's so pretty I couldn't resist.  Locally harvested (and milled by us) eastern red cedar, for the closets.  This is a highly aromatic cedar that keeps moths out of my wool sweaters.  We'll use it for the interior walls of our closets.

Besides being aromatic, it's also beautiful, with swirls of red, pink and purple.  This all came from a local apple orchard where the cedar trees had been planted for insect control.  They were expanding the fruit trees and cutting the cedar.  We had it sawn into planks, then air-dried and surfaced it into finished boards.